1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a touch keyboard, and more particularly to a light-emitting touch keyboard.
2. Related Art
A keyboard is a common peripheral device disposed in an electronic product such as a computer, a mobile phone or a personal digital assistant (PDA), and used as an operating interface for a user to input control instructions.
Meanwhile, in order to enable the user to input control instructions through a keyboard in use of environments with different light intensities, currently, a keyboard with a light emitting function has already been developed in the industry. For the keyboard with a light emitting function, an elastic member, a scissor-type structure, and a keycap are sequentially disposed on a circuit board, and a light guide plate and a plurality of light sources are disposed below the circuit board, so as to form a mechanical (or scissor-type) light-emitting keyboard. The plurality of light sources are disposed below the light guide plate or at a side edge of the light guide plate, such that a light guiding structure in the light guide plate reflects light rays generated by the plurality of light sources to the keycap, thereby achieving the light-emitting effect of the keyboard.
However, the mechanical light-emitting keyboard has a rather complex structure, and since the keycap, the scissor-type structure, and the elastic member are disposed protruding from the circuit board and occupy certain space, the volume of the mechanical light-emitting keyboard cannot be reduced, so that the mechanical light-emitting keyboard is not suitable for use in electronic devices with increasing requirements for compact design.
In recent years, with the rapid development of touch control technologies, as well as the features such as light weight and small thickness of touch-control devices, some related manufacturers apply the touch control technologies to the structure of the keyboard. A current method is to further dispose a light guide plate and a reflecting sheet below a touchpad including an indium tin oxide (ITO) film and/or ITO glass, and dispose a plurality of light sources below the light guide plate or at a side edge of the light guide plate. Likewise, the light sources emit light rays to the light guide plate, and a light guiding structure of the light guide plate and the reflecting sheet transmit the light rays to the touchpad to illuminate the touchpad, so as to achieve the light-emitting effect of the touch keyboard.
However, since the light-emitting touch keyboard as mentioned above still requires to dispose the light guide plate below the touchpad, the thickness of the light-emitting touch keyboard after assembly is in proportion to the thickness of the used light guide plate. That is, if the light guide plate is thick, the overall thickness of the light-emitting touch keyboard is increased.
In addition, since the plurality of light sources are disposed below the light guide plate or at the side edge of the light guide plate and have a certain height, the thickness of the light-emitting touch keyboard cannot be effectively reduced. Meanwhile, due to the arrangement of combining the light guide plate below the touchpad, a production worker must perform one more assembly procedure to combine the light guide plate below the touchpad during assembly of the light-emitting touch keyboard, which not only lowers the production efficiency of the light-emitting touch keyboard, but also increases the manufacturing and production cost of the light-emitting touch keyboard due to the use of the light guide plate.